3 posts tagged “hip hop”

Dosh is another one man project, sometimes augmented by guests and collaborators (notably Fog's Andrew Broder, Andrew Bird, Bonnie 'Prince Billy', and others). His usual working method is to build songs layer by layer, armed with a drum kit, rhodes piano, assorted keyboards, and some looping devices. you can get a good idea of how that works in this video.

This track is from his newest album, "Wolves & Wishes," which I guess kind of makes it the title track. I don't have any particular reason for posting this one, other than that it was what rocked out to on my commute home today. A lot of Dosh's work has a more hip hop feel to it, often with slow melodies on top of double-time beats, or vice versa. In this piece, most of the parts work at a similar pace, with swift, overlapping melodic lines on synthesizer and sax over a peppy drum beat, giving the whole thing an unusually upbeat feeling.

If you're an electronic music fan and you're not familiar with the netlabel phenomenon, you're missing out on a lot of fresh and innovative work that's available right now, for free, from the comfort of your own home. You could conceivably acquire enough free, legal, high-quality music to rid yourself of the icky ethics of major label music, and the murky waters of indies that are merely major label subsidiaries in disguise.

Headphone Science (AKA Dustin Craig) is one of my personal favorites from this scene, and "Cityscape Tracer," from the Setsumei EP is the track that made me fall in love. It has the best elements of early, melodic Autechre combined with the vocal cut-up experiments of Prefuse 73, skirting the boundaries of hip-hop and IDM. Craig is as prolific as he is talented, with a wide assortment of releases, both physical and virtual, on a wide variety of labels. They're all worth checking out.

I am cursed. Or maybe this song is. Either way, as soon as I chose it as my song to upload today, the power on my block went out. As in, the exact same second I clicked on the upload button.

But the juice is back now.

The Roots of Orchis hail from San Diego, and play a deep and lethargic sort of instrumental hip hop, with a seasoning of post-rock and dub. I've seen them live once, when the group was composed of two bassists, a turntablist, a drummer, and a synth/sampler player. The poor club PA couldn't handle the insane amounts of low end being generated on stage. Their albums, Some Things Plural and Crooked Ceilings, are both excellent forays into a world that at one point would have been called trip hop.

This track comes from the Translation Music 3 compilation. Translation Music was originally released on Don Lee Records, by Jon Fee of the Rum Diary, in hand stamped manila envelopes. The third volume was released by Substandard, and was upgraded to jewel cases, though it lost some of its handmade charm in the process. The Roots of Orchis are veterans of the series, with a live track appearing on Vol. 1 and this Björk cover on Vol. 3.

(Full disclosure: Translation Music holds a special place in my heart partly because my old band appears on Vol. 2).